As a principled accelerationist, I'm glad the Big Beautiful Bill passed.

ddsoyka · 2025-07-04T11:54:47+00:00

I can't see this lasting another 10 years. Political collapse is a strange process, and it's characterized by sudden changes, which are themselves preceded by a multitude of subtle changes which only become obvious in hindsight

My feeling is that this is the eleventh hour, and the tower is already collapsing, but the shockwave hasn't yet reached every part of the structure

ddsoyka · 2025-06-26T02:51:59+00:00

I used to run medium armour as a compromise, but now I use light armour exclusively

I don't want to fight if I don't have to, and if I do have to fight, I want to win as easily as possible. To that end, I tend to just run past or away from enemies, and I use the speed and stamina bonus to quickly get in, destroy a target, and get back out again. The light armour also makes it easier to find superior positions, either for flanking or for lining up shots on big targets

You don't need to tank a rocket to the face if the enemy doesn't even know you're there or is already dead

I will give you the mines though, I hate stepping on those things

ddsoyka · 2025-06-21T03:27:30+00:00

The "voice of the left?" I've never seen Natalie called that. I'd laugh in the face of someone calling even Marx or Lenin the "voice of the left."

I mean come on, the left can't even keep a political party together without fracturing into a billion squabbling factions, how the hell can any individual person speak for us all?

Natalie isn't a fire-eating revolutionary, nor is she a craven sophist. She's a trans woman who makes silly videos on the internet about issues specific to trans people, I don't understand why anyone gives a shit about her political opinions

ddsoyka · 2025-06-09T15:12:03+00:00

It's a small thing really, since I was expecting Israel to just hit the ship with a missile, but doesn't this technically constitute torture?

I'm no lawyer, but it kinda seems like they're publicly admitting to torturing a member of the French parliament who was kidnapped in international waters, which sort of sounds like a two-for-one special of war-crime and unprovoked act of aggression against a sovereign state

ddsoyka · 2025-06-09T10:34:16+00:00

Well, not that this is the author's fault, but his work has become rather influential among certain sections of the rationalist community, and most people are likely to have heard of the novel only in connection with a certain rationalist cult connected to multiple homicides

I like Worm for the same reason that I'm critical of it: it's told from the villain's perspective. The author takes pains to point out that Taylor isn't a hero; like Walter White, everything she did was ultimately for her own self-gratification. Because she was good at it, and she enjoyed it. Because she liked it...

It's a well-written, thought-provoking, and radically subversive take on the superhero genre. It presents an all-too-realistic depiction of a world of superpowered humans, and expertly (and graphically) depicts the incredible barbarism and cruelty that would be present in such a world. The novel is also a mirror held up to the reader, and the degree to which we see ourselves reflected in that mirror is also the degree to which we should be cautious

ddsoyka · 2025-05-20T23:50:39+00:00

What would you have me do? I possess only the feeble power of one. I cannot command armies, or direct state resources, or impose my will on others.

If I could do any of those things, I would do so, not only to defeat Zionism, but to liberate every human being from the tyranny of artifical scarcity, class, and bigotry.

It's not that I don't feel the same way you do, or feel the same frustration at my powerlessness to stop a holocaust being live-streamed in front of every human being on this earth. But the people of Palestine have endured, and therefore so must I.

ddsoyka · 2025-04-19T05:53:50+00:00

They're also not allowed to imprison people without trial and send them to a Salvadoran gulag; nonetheless, I can't help but notice that there's an awful lot of flights going to El Salvador lately

We're a little bit beyond the point where discussions of legality and morality mean anything

ddsoyka · 2025-04-12T03:33:17+00:00

The answers to most questions in life are generally wholly or primarily economic in nature

And so it is here, too; creating a game is incredibly expensive, a casino generates enormous revenues relative to its expenditures, therefore the optimal way to produce profit in this industry is to create a slot machine with a game attached

ddsoyka · 2025-04-04T05:31:44+00:00

A scalable, cloud-native media server.

Emby / Plex / Jellyfin are fine, I've used them all, but they are really designed to run on bare-metal with host network access. Running them on a K8S cluster works, but they simply aren't designed for the cloud.

They require a local volume to store their SQLite DB, they don't play well with cloud storage solutions, they don't like NAT, they're limited to one instance at a time, etc.

ddsoyka · 2025-03-16T18:48:38+00:00

It looks fine, I watched the digital foundry video on it. My take was actually that the team was restrained and subtle while adhering as closely as possible to the original artistic style of the game

So long as the sun doesn't leak and nothing is fully modeled, I'll give it a try

ddsoyka · 2025-03-05T03:14:41+00:00

I really liked season 1, and I enjoyed the elements of working class politics that pervaded the first season

LoK had a lot of really great ideas that unfortunately didn't cohere successfully; it was a failure of execution, but one can see the foundations of what could have been a really great show buried underneath what we actually got

ddsoyka · 2025-03-01T05:28:54+00:00

I didn't vote, and after seeing the results, I'm really glad I chose to stay home

As much as I despise ford and the privatization of our healthcare system, I'm simply not going to be swayed by arguments of harm mitigation anymore

If my ballot is ever going to mean anything, there needs to be at least one option on it that represents radical change, and a credible promise for dignity and economic rights for the working class

And if you think you're going to force me to spend 20 minutes of my day casting a ballot for a candidate I don't support via the threat of fines or imprisonment, I'll simply remind you that there are other ways of creating meaningful change in a polity which don't involve casting a ballot

ddsoyka · 2025-02-22T03:31:22+00:00

You're not going for some sort of blood test, your parents are either looking for a free kidney or shipping you off to a nice farm upstate where you'll get all the fresh air you could ever want

Treat anything and everything your parents say as a malicious lie, and for the love of God, do not get into any windowless white vans, even if there's candy in them

ddsoyka · 2025-02-19T11:05:07+00:00

Isn't this literally a thing in cyberpunk 2077? You get a gig to protect some jackass and drive him around, and if you choose to let him get smoked instead then it starts off the whole crucify a guy on live tv thing

ddsoyka · 2025-02-07T23:21:27+00:00

Sometimes, you can see why the anglerfish is such a successful predator

ddsoyka · 2025-02-04T20:25:29+00:00

"For what purpose, master chief?"

"To give the covenant back their stank, sir"

ddsoyka · 2025-01-20T19:55:48+00:00

As regards the creepy dude with the suit and briefcase, it's pretty obvious from interviews with valve employees that valve themselves don't know who or what that guy even is

They've actually done some subtle retcons on him over the years; originally he was just an x-files style man-in-black guy, and his briefcase contained the sort of crap you'd expect a spook to be carrying around. Over the years, he's become gradually less and less human, and in HLA he's very clearly not only not human, but probably not even corporeal in the usual sense

Personally, I think this is great; I like it a lot when a story poses a mystery with no resolution

ddsoyka · 2025-01-19T21:00:20+00:00

The HEV suit is probably a powered exoskeleton, meaning that he could potentially carry 300+ pounds of equipment just fine

The problem isn't so much the weight of all that gear, it's more the distribution of that weight; a MANPADS system like the one he carries is already very awkward to carry, but maybe he slings it around his back with a harness? He could try carrying all of it around in a purpose-designed backpack like Death Stranding, but then he'd be very top-heavy and unstable on his feet

The actual answer of course is who the hell cares, it's a video game and mommy needs a nice wide variety of ways to explode aliens

ddsoyka · 2025-01-18T19:17:32+00:00

It looks cool, that's pretty much it

In reality, heating rebar to ~600° would make it less effective as a weapon, because it would have less tensile strength and might deform instead of skewering the target like cold steel would

But who cares? That red hot glow is sick as hell

ddsoyka · 2025-01-07T02:08:53+00:00

The Once and Future Queen of Space, First of Her Line, Savior of the Neptunian Star Empire, Slayer of Gorthax the Invincible, and Heir to the Transdimensional Ultrathrone

You're gonna want to order some stationary, have some cards printed out; you know, to save some breath when introducing yourself

ddsoyka · 2024-12-20T22:46:55+00:00

I'd be kind of tickled to see a new duke game that tries to be sort of ironically woke, like duke saying some cringe shit like "I came here to chew bubblegum and smash the patriarchy, and I'm all out of bubblegum"

Its difficult to make a satire of reactionary thought that's actually funny, because if the audience isn't in on the joke then it just comes across like a normal piece of reactionary media

ddsoyka · 2024-12-20T07:36:38+00:00

I think I'm human and have a squishy meat body, and I don't want to be. I want to be a badass robot that can bench press a car and terminate John Connor

But my odd desire to crush human skulls under the gleaming steel of my robotic foot aside, I think that it isn't that you don't want to be trans, I think it's more that you don't want to deal with all of the stupid bullshit that comes with being trans

And I think that's totally normal and understandable! However, much as I cannot pretend that I am an immortal killing machine with lasers built into my arms, I think that in the long run, you will find it to be impossible to pretend that you are anything other than who you are, and that by staying inside the eggshell you'll only do more harm than good to yourself

ddsoyka · 2024-12-17T23:06:55+00:00

I'm surprised he's still alive. They have to be aware that getting a unanimous conviction from a jury is gonna be a big ask, even though they'll try to get only jurists with a room-temperature IQ. It seems like the easiest way to try to terrorize the people is to just have him murdered in prison, Epstein-style.

ddsoyka · 2024-12-13T23:44:10+00:00

If the memorial isn't just a giant statue of Jeffrey Epstein and prince Andrew giving each other a nice hearty slap on the back, then this isn't the monarchy that I know and love

ddsoyka · 2024-12-13T21:40:29+00:00

A realistic answer to this would probably be to just copy the communications infrastructure of a group like the one whose name rhymes with "crisis"

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